Only 113g but it moves like the train.
Eastbound
A French passenger shelters a Russian conscript on the Trans-Siberian railway who wants to desert but cannot speak her language.
113g
Weighs the same as Sawyer Squeeze + Sunscreen
- Ultralight
- Past Bedtime
- Fiction
On the Trans-Siberian railway, a terrified young conscript decides to desert, and the French woman who hides him in her berth speaks no Russian at all. One train, two strangers, thousands of kilometers of taiga sliding past the window—de Kerangal holds the tension of a thriller inside sentences that run as fast as the landscape flying by. Eastbound is a highly sensory sprint through snow and paranoia, capturing two lives locked together in escape. 113g, and it moves like the train.
Field notes
Eastbound began as a text for French radio, written in just ten days after de Kerangal returned from a journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway. She read it aloud for France Culture, and has said the rush to finish it became inseparable from the urgency of her young deserter's flight. The journey also gave her an unusual experience of time: crossing time zones eastward, she found that days aboard the train seemed to expand and contract, governed less by clocks than by hunger, sleep, and daylight.